UX Quotes

Visual Design Quotes

“Interface design isn’t only about making a device or application look attractive… it’s about making an appropriately pleasing application or device that people find useful and usable and want to integrate into their lives.” – Dan Saffer (source)

“Natural elegance deals with the ‘feel’ a website or application expresses through its behavior over time, and which is rooted in the rules of order that govern nature… It’s possible to create perfectly pleasing websites by focusing only on formal, structural, and logical elegance. But those sites that embrace [natural] elegance feel to users like living beings who speak meaningful words; they are the marriage of form, function, pleasing content, and personal feeling.” – David Sherwin (source)

“A good user experience designer needs to be able to see both the forest and the trees. That means user experience has implications that go far beyond usability, visual design, and physical affordances. As UX designers, we orchestrate a complex series of interactions.” – Eric Reiss (source)

“The people in business must understand what they can achieve with designers. Designers have to understand that they really must deliver to business not just beautification, or another form of it, but substantial change.” – Hartmut Esslinger (source)

“Good design at least part of the time, includes the criteria of being direct in relation to the problem at hand-not obscure, trendy, or stylish. A new language, visual or verbal, must be couched in a language that is already understood.” – Ivan Chermayeff (source)

“Information architecture defines the structure of information. Interaction design enables people to manipulate and contribute to that information. Visual design communicates these possibilities to people and creates affinity to them. User experience is the summation of these considerations.” – Luke Wroblewski (source)

“Design has been viewed as being aesthetic. Design equals How Something Looks. You see this attitude to design in every part of society–clothing design to interior design, less so in product design, and yes, in web design…. I think design covers so much more than the aesthetic. Design is fundamentally more. Design is usability. It is Information Architecture. It is Accessibility. This is all design.” – Mark Boulton (source)

“The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design” – Massimo Vignelli (source)

“You can have information and ease of use and have artistic integrity at the same time. The art of being a good Web designer is getting yourself into that middle ground and treating it as a final destination instead of as a compromise.” – Mike Davidson (source)

“Good design is a great combination of common sense, unusual imagination, clarity of purpose-with a prerequisite knowledge of structure, values, color, aesthetic insight and a deep reverence for the love of life.” – Millard Sheets (source)

“Smart graphic design is always some balance of current expressive trends, information architecture, classical layout aesthetics, and detailed research on user preferences and motivations. You should never ignore solid user experience data, but mountains of data won’t auto-magically build you a successful site. Design is a synthetic activity. It can be informed by the results of analysis, but the tools of analysis don’t create beautiful designs.” – Patrick Lynch (source)

“Without aesthetic, design is either the humdrum repetition of familiar clichés or a wild scramble for novelty. Without the aesthetic, the computer is but a mindless speed machine, producing effects without substance. Form without relevant content, or content without meaningful form.” – Paul Rand (source)

“A work of art is realized when form and content are indistinguishable. When they are in synthesis. In other words, when they fuse. When form predominates, meaning is blunted… When content predominates, interest lags.” – Paul Rand (source)

“Art is an idea that has found its perfect visual expression. And design is the vehicle by which this expression is made possible. Art is a noun, and design is a noun and also a verb. Art is a product and design is a process. Design is the foundation of all the arts.” – Paul Rand (source)

“Form and function aren’t separate items. If we believe that style somehow exists independent of functionality, that we can treat aesthetics and function as two separate pieces, then we ignore the evidence that beauty is much more than decoration.” – Stephen P. Anderson (source)

“Creating visual imagery is a state of mind. It involves the reproduction of what we see. But much more than that, it becomes an outlet to express feelings about what we experience.” – Tracy Sabin (source)